George McLean Harper

George McLean Harper ( – July 14, 1947) was an American professor of literature at Princeton University. Harper was best known for his scholarship on the writings and biographies of the English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.

He was born in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Princeton University in 1884. After graduating, he worked as an editor for a few years before returning to Princeton in 1892, where he taught French and Italian while working on his PhD. In 1900, Harper became Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres and English Language and Literature at Princeton.

While teaching at Princeton, Harper published several books on literature. He took a position on the panel of Pulitzer Prize judges in 1929. Harper retired from Princeton in 1933 and focused on his own writing. He died in 1947.

Early life and education George McLean Harper was born in in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, to William Wylie Harper and Nancy Jane McLean Harper. He studied at Princeton University, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1884. After graduating he was a copy editor and journalist at the New-York Tribune for six months. Afterwards, he studied at the University of Göttingen and University of Berlin. He was assistant editor of Scribner's Magazine from 1887 until 1889. He received a master's degree and Doctor of Philosophy from the university in 1892. He became the Woodhull Chair in the Department of Romance Languages in 1895. His work on Wordsworth was considered "pioneering". He became the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton in 1926, He also reviewed Wilson's The New Democracy, Presidential Messages, Address, and Other Papers (1913–1917). In 1928, Harper coined the term "Conversation poems" to describe a group of eight poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that were addressed to a close friend of the poet. The name came from the title of "The Nightingale. A Conversation Poem", one of the poems in the group. Harper had previously identified the poems as a distinct group in a 1925 essay. In 1929, Harper became a member of the committee of judges for the Pulitzer Prize. After his retirement, he became special lecturer in English literature at Princeton.

He died of a heart attack at the age of 87 on July 14, 1947. He was married to Belle Dunton Westcott, with whom he had a daughter and a son, George Harper McLean Jr. After Harper's death, his wife presented the collected George McLean Harper Papers to Princeton University.